"Eneza Education is a for-profit company that offers educational tools to students in Kenya through text message. In a country (and continent) where cellphone penetration is high but internet access is low, they offer a virtual tutor that students can access through a low cost mobile phone.

Toni Maraviglia is the co-founder & CEO of Eneza Education. She talks to Nora about the 500,000 students already taking courses with Eneza."

"Just a few years ago, cellphones were a rarity reserved for the elite in Burma (also known as Myanmar). But now, they've exploded in popularity.

Spark checks in with a design team working on a digital communications tool for rural farmers there. Lauren Serota and Taiei Harimoto talk about how, because so many people in Burma are new to cell technology, they don't have the biases the rest of us have built up about how the technology is "supposed" to work. We also learn about novel uses for cellphones as income generators, and in the recent election.

"CAPITAL: You were a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania before becoming a journalist. Why did you decide to leave academia?

CARMODY: “Decide” might be the wrong word. I was on the academic job market for two years, 2008 and 2009, which were really just a slaughterhouse. Getting a tenure-track job or a good postdoc in the humanities is kind of like getting drafted into the N.B.A. in any year, but schools were cancelling searches and trimming their adjunct budgets right and left, and more and more jobless PhDs were piling up. I was in the top two or three for a couple of really good jobs, which was harder in some ways because it felt really close. Some people keep playing the lottery for years and years, but I just didn’t have the heart to keep doing it.

But I was really lucky; I’d been writing online for popular and crossover publications while I was still in grad school, a couple of essays in The Atlantic. I wrote a future-of-media blog with Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan called Snarkmarket that was really smart and fun and popular with the right people. Jason Kottke liked my writing and asked me to guest-edit his blog. Then Wired took a chance and hired me—I really couldn’t have asked for a better first job in journalism. After that, all the momentum for me was in journalism, so I’ve been doing that ever since.

Still, I’d totally be Professor Carmody in UC-Santa Barbara’s English department if things had gone my way, and I don’t know, maybe that would have been a happy ending too.

CAPITAL: Does your academic background still inform your reporting, or have you found that the skills valued by academia and those valued by journalism are total opposites?

CARMODY: I think the tools of journalism and scholarship complement each other. I had to learn how to be a reporter: do phone interviews, develop sources, write up different genres of articles. In some ways, I appreciated the tools of reporting more, because when you’re writing about Citizen Kane, you can’t get Orson Welles or Gregg Toland on the phone. If you’re writing about Netflix, you might be able to get Reed Hastings or Ted Sarandos on the phone. That’s pretty amazing.

In other cases, I think my training gave me some significant advantages. I’m really good at research, at context. I’m good at breaking down a document, whether it’s a press release or a letter to shareholders or an interview, and digging out what’s important. I’m good at linking things that are happening right now to big changes that happen over decades. I’m really comfortable with the publishing and media industries; I speak their language.

Also, besides research, I was a teacher for ten years. I love working with younger writers, whether it’s as an editor or just helping them think about what they do, because that was my job. And a lot of the students I taught in college have gone on to have really great careers in the industries I write about, which is really satisfying too."

…

"CAPITAL: You've extensively studied the history, theory, and future of writing. So what’s the future of writing?

CARMODY: I’m bullish on writing. Movies, radio, television, and now digital media—everything was supposed to push us away from text, to video or “back” to speech. First, there’s no going back. We’re always stumbling forward. Second, writing is invincible. Thirty years ago, we thought we’d all be talking to our computers; instead, we’re all typing on our phones. Can you believe we get to play and work on machines that give you new things to read all day? If you’d told me this when I was six years old, I’d have fainted from happiness.

We live in such a hyperliterate world, soaked and saturated in writing: on our machines, on the streets, on our television screens. It’s just that writing doesn’t live in the boxes that it used to. The genie is out of the bottle. But that just means that the magic could be anywhere."

'Living under permanent surveillance and what that means for our freedom'

…

"Put a collar with a GPS chip around your dog’s neck and from that moment onwards you will be able to follow your dog on an online map and get a notification on your phone whenever your dog is outside a certain area. You want to take good care of your dog, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that the collar also functions as a fitness tracker. Now you can set your dog goals and check out graphs with trend lines. It is as Bruce Sterling says: “You are Fluffy’s Zuckerberg”.

What we are doing to our pets, we are also doing to our children.

The ‘Amber Alert’, for example, is incredibly similar to the Pet Tracker. Its users are very happy: “It’s comforting to look at the app and know everyone is where they are supposed to be!” and “The ability to pull out my phone and instantly monitor my son’s location, takes child safety to a whole new level.” In case you were wondering, it is ‘School Ready’ with a silent mode for educational settings.

Then there is ‘The Canary Project’ which focuses on American teens with a driver’s license. If your child is calling somebody, texting or tweeting behind the wheel, you will be instantly notified. You will also get a notification if your child is speeding or is outside the agreed-on territory.

If your child is ignoring your calls and doesn’t reply to your texts, you can use the ‘Ignore no more’ app. It will lock your child’s phone until they call you back. This clearly shows that most surveillance is about control. Control is the reason why we take pleasure in surveilling ourselves more and more.

I won’t go into the ‘Quantified Self’ movement and our tendency to put an endless amount of sensors on our body attempting to get “self knowlegde through numbers”. As we have already taken the next step towards control: algorithmic punishment if we don’t stick to our promises or reach our own goals."

…

"Normally his self-measured productivity would average around 40%, but with Kara next to him, his productiviy shot upward to 98%. So what do you do with that lesson? You create a wristband that shocks you whenever you fail to keep to your own plan. The wristband integrates well, of course, with other apps in your “productivity ecosystem”."

…

"On Kickstarter the makers of the ‘Blink’ camera tried to crowdfund 200.000 dollars for their invention. They received over one millions dollars instead. The camera is completely wireless, has a battery that lasts a year and streams HD video straight to your phone."

…

"I would love to speak about the problems of gentrification in San Francisco, or about a culture where nobody thinks you are crazy when you utter the sentence “Don’t touch me, I’ll fucking sue you” or about the fact this Google Glass user apparently wasn’t ashamed enough about this interaction to not post this video online. But I am going to talk about two other things: the first-person perspective and the illusionary symmetry of the Google Glass.

First the perspective from which this video was filmed. When I saw the video for the first time I was completely fascinated by her own hand which can be seen a few times and at some point flips the bird."

…

"The American Civil Liberties Union (also known as the ACLU) released a report late last year listing the advantages and disadvantages of bodycams. The privacy concerns of the people who will be filmed voluntarily or involuntarily and of the police officers themselves (remember Ai Weiwei’s guards who were continually watched) are weighed against the impact bodycams might have in combatting arbitrary police violence."

…

"A short while ago I noticed that you didn’t have to type in book texts anymore when filling in a reCAPTCHA. Nowadays you type in house numbers helping Google, without them asking you, to further digitize the physical world."

…

"This is the implicit view on humanity that the the big tech monopolies have: an extremely cheap source of labour which can be brought to a high level of productivity through the smart use of machines. To really understand how this works we need to take a short detour to the gambling machines in Las Vegas."

…

"Taleb has written one of the most important books of this century. It is called ‘Anti-fragile: Things That Gain from Disorder’ and it explores how you should act in a world that is becoming increasingly volatile. According to him, we have allowed efficiency thinking to optimize our world to such an extent that we have lost the flexibility and slack that is necessary for dealing with failure. This is why we can no longer handle any form of risk.

Paradoxically this leads to more repression and a less safe environment. Taleb illustrates this with an analogy about a child which is raised by its parents in a completely sterile environment having a perfect life without any hard times. That child will likely grow up with many allergies and will not be able to navigate the real world.

We need failure to be able to learn, we need inefficiency to be able to recover from mistakes, we have to take risks to make progress and so it is imperative to find a way to celebrate imperfection.

We can only keep some form of true freedom if we manage to do that. If we don’t, we will become cogs in the machines. I want to finish with a quote from Ai Weiwei:

“Freedom is a pretty strange thing. Once you’ve experienced it, it remains in your heart, and no one can take it away. Then, as an individual, you can be more powerful than a whole country.”

"Mod: One of the great benefits of the web is everything can have a unique address that is accessible as a net connection, effectively. There’s something incredible powerful about that. So, to build an iOS app-only, Android app-only ecosystem feels like, to me, you’re leaving on the floor 80 percent of the magic of what the Internet brings to publishing.

So one of the core precepts of this project was certainly to be very open on the web — accessible anywhere, from any device. When you start from that place, it just makes sense to first and foremost optimize for the web experience and then kind of work your way back.

One of the reasons I think Safari on the iPhone, the Chrome browser, any of these things, aren’t as good as they could be for running applications is because five years ago, or whenever the App Store opened, we sort of abandoned the web in a way."

…

"Mod: When we started, it was far more focused on the mapping piece. I remember one of the stakes in the ground that we had a year ago was “every page must have a map.” You quickly realize that maps are not that interesting. It’s this fallacy, that maps are inherently interesting objects.

I love maps. I love old maps, I love printed maps, I love navigating cities with strange maps. I love all of that. But I think we tend to conflate maps as context vs. content. And a lot of products that use maps and feature maps treat it as content, and most of the time a map is not a very interesting thing. We just need it quickly, for a little bit of context, and then have it go away."

…

"You can look at a tool like Hi and go, “Well, why am I putting my writing into this other space that I don’t own?” Whereas with WordPress you can download it, can host your own WordPress site, and yada, yada, yada. But one of the advantages of placing it into this pre-existing space is you get the community. So that’s been fun."

…

"Mod: I think it depends on the kind of writing that you’re doing and what your goals as a writer are. As isolated as writers tend to be, there are so many workshopping groups. And I think there is a natural tendency as a writer to need to get out of your isolation chamber and get some feedback and have human contact and discuss things out in the open. So I think there’s a tremendous benefit to that.But obviously not all kinds of writing should be done in this way, it goes without saying.

But I think there are certain kinds that — why not do the experiment of trying them? And travel writing, I think, fits really naturally within this space. One of the things going on with Hi that we haven’t really talked a lot about is the topics. Anybody can add a moment, they can invent a topic, they can add to existing topics — they can do whatever they want. Topics are meant to be a response to undiscoverability and impossibility to navigate — the nature of hashtags."

"Well, what do you know? The graph doesn't show a progressively faster rate of technology adoption by the American public. What was once a clean graph that fit convenient and largely unquestioned ideas about exponential growth in tech suddenly becomes more complex.P

But please don't go passing around this new graph either. Because it's nearly as worthless as Vox's graph as a way to understand the history of technology. Why would it matter how long a technology took to go from "invention" (a really messy and complex concept) to 25 percent adoption?P

Fun With Arbitrary Numbers

If we really want to play this game, perhaps we can look at a different measure of adoption: from about 5 percent to 50 percent. To be clear, this is just as arbitrary as trying to pin down an invention date and seeing how many years it took to reach 25 percent adoption. But it feels like a slightly more honest way to measure tech growth.P

When a technology is in about 5% of American households, this means it's still in the hands of early adopters, tinkerers, and the wealthy. Breaching 50 percent usually means that it's within the reach of the middle class. So what if we look at TV technology through this lens?"

"One of the great joys of that walk was the ability to immediately share with family and friends the images as they were captured in the mountains: the golden, early-morning light as it filtered through the cedar forest; a sudden valley vista after a long, upward climb. Each time, I pulled out my iPhone, not the GX1, then shot, edited, and broadcasted the photo within minutes. As I’ve become a more network-focussed photographer, I’ve come to love using the smartphone as an editing surface; touch is perfect for photo manipulation. There’s a tactility that is lost when you edit with a mouse on a desktop computer. Perhaps touch feels natural because it’s a return to the chemical-filled days of manually poking and massaging liquid and paper to form an image I had seen in my head. Yet if the advent of digital photography compressed the core processes of the medium, smartphones further squish the full spectrum of photographic storytelling: capture, edit, collate, share, and respond. I saw more and shot more, and returned from the forest with a record of both the small details—light and texture and snippets of life—and the conversations that floated around them on my social networks.

In the same way that the transition from film to digital is now taken for granted, the shift from cameras to networked devices with lenses should be obvious. While we’ve long obsessed over the size of the film and image sensors, today we mainly view photos on networked screens—often tiny ones, regardless of how the image was captured—and networked photography provides access to forms of data that go beyond pixels. This information, like location, weather, or even radiation levels, can transform an otherwise innocuous photo of an empty field near Fukushima into an entirely different object. If you begin considering emerging self-metrics that measure, for example, your routes through cities, fitness level, social status, and state of mind (think Foursquare, Nike+, Facebook, and Twitter), you realize that there is a compelling universe of information waiting to be pinned to the back of each image. Once you start thinking of a photograph in those holistic terms, the data quality of stand-alone cameras, no matter how vast their bounty of pixels, seems strangely impoverished. They no longer capture the whole picture.

It’s clear now that the Nikon D70 and its ilk were a stopgap between that old Leica M3 that I coveted over a decade ago and the smartphones we photograph with today. Tracing the evolution from the Nikon 8008 to the Nikon D70 to the GX1, we see cameras transitioning into what they were bound to become: networked lenses. [Max Fenton adds on @Reading: "And books into networked screens."]Susan Sontag once said, “While there appears to be nothing that photography can’t devour, whatever can’t be photographed becomes less important.” Today, it turns out, it’s whatever can’t be networked that becomes less important."

"Thinker, writer, curator, editor, blogger, and currently a Contributing Editor for Art in America and on the faculty at ICP-Bard College and the School of Visual Arts, Heiferman has watched the photography market explode and the acquisition policies of galleries and museums adapt accordingly. The art market is a one-percenter game, and Heiferman thinks it distracts us from the uses of images in our everyday lives. Photography is all around us and used in ways we don’t even consider. Raw File spoke to Heiferman about surveillance, facial recognition, the obsolescence of future technologies and why Midwest newspapers are so good at reporting the weird stuff about image use."

…

"People talk about photography being a universal language but really it’s not; it’s multiple languages. The dialogues you can have with neuroscientists about photographic images are as interesting and as provocative as the dialogues you can have with artists. People have wildly different contexts in which they use photographs — different criteria for assessing them, reasons for taking them, priorities when looking at and evaluating them. It creates incredible possibilities for dialogue when you realize the medium is so flexible and so useful."

…

"Look at Flickr. Look at what people do. It is fascinating to look at what people are taking pictures of, as we all take more and more pictures. I spoke with a guy named Steve Hoffenberg who worked for Lyra Research [now owned by Photizo] and is one of the go-to-guys when you want to find out how many people are taking pictures any given day. Steve talked about how the availability of cell phones cameras has changed the way we make images.

In the past, it was more conventional; we had to have reason to make a picture and it was usually to document something specific. Whereas now people are now take pictures because the camera is there [in their hand]. It has got to the point where sometimes if you ask people why they take pictures they can’t even say. I think people are using images in a completely different way and as a communicative tool."

…

"With people more actively using images, visual literacy becomes an important thing to talk about. Everybody pays a lot of lip service to visual literacy but very few schools teach it. There’s not a lot of discussion about what photography is. What’s a photograph? How does it work? Photographs are useful to you in different ways than they are useful to me."

“It is a generational thing, of course. The worst offenders are teenagers – in terms of the group who are the most distracted because this is the generation who never knew life when it was “real”. They live in the continuous future. They have no experience of subtlety, nuance or considered responses – only of instant, illiterate and ill-considered ones. The gratification teens crave is not the warm smile of affection or the approving comment from another human, but the sense of achievement they gain from electronic validation. Emails, texts and updates pinging in reassure them they are alive and popular and abreast of rolling social news.”

"So true. I remember what it was like back in my day: we teenagers then were masters of subtlety and nuance, and we considered every response most carefully. What a falling-off there has been to the little monsters that surround us now…"

"But now the magic has worked. The demo has turned the raw data of the connections into a “community” that imbues the reader or user of the interactive maps with a warm and fuzzy feeling of belonging to something more “real” than the borders imposed by government bureaucrats. Not sure what I mean? These communities are our new neighborhoods, in a Jane Jacobs vein. In that neighborhoody way, they are reassuring and natural. It’s incumbent upon us to ask questions about the raw data, for this now has deep implications in terms of our political unions, loyalties, and economies. Who do your taxes support? Who’s interests are not represented in the political sphere when they live “across the river” in a less-powerful Congressional district, for example?"

"Back to the original question: What are you really looking at when you’re looking at The Connected States of America? I’d say you’re watching an ad produced for AT&T, but I’d like to hear arguments otherwise."

"…not so long ago parents drove a teenager to campus, said tearful goodbye & returned home to wait week or so for phone call from dorm. Mom or Dad, in turn, might write letters…

But going to college these days means never having to say goodbye, thanks to near-saturation of cellphones, email, instant messaging, texting, Facebook and Skype. Researchers are looking at how new technology may be delaying the point at which college-bound students truly become independent from their parents, & how phenomena such as the introduction of unlimited calling plans have changed the nature of parent-child relationships, & not always for the better."

[Anyone looking into comparisons w/ countries where university students mostly live at home? This isn't new to them. There's something to be said about maintaining strong family ties. Many implications here regarding depression, over-emphasis of the individual, etc. Helicopter parents exist for reasons other than technology.]

"This publication is the product of a collaboration that started in the fall of 2010 when a total of eighty New School faculty, librarians, students, and staff came together to think about teaching and learning with digital media. These conversations, leading up to the MobilityShifts Summit, inspired this collection of essays, which was rigorously peer-reviewed.

The Open Peer Review process took place on MediaCommons, [1] an all-electronic scholarly publishing network focused on the field of Media Studies developed in partnership with the Institute for the Future of the Book and the NYU Libraries. We received 155 comments by dozens of reviewers. The authors started the review process by reflecting on each other’s texts, followed by invited scholars, and finally, an intensive social media campaign helped to solicit commentary from the public at large."

"Powers…came away thinking he'd witnessed “a gigantic competition to see who can be more absent from the people & conversations happening right around them. Everyone in Austin was gazing into their little devices — a bit desperately, too, as if their lives depended on not missing the next tweet.”

In a phone conversation a few weeks afterward, Mr. Powers said that he is far from being a Luddite, but that he doesn’t “buy into the idea that digital natives can do both screen and eye contact.”

“They are not fully present because we are not built that way,” he said.

Where other people saw freedom — from desktop, from social convention, from boring guy in front of them — Mr. Powers saw “a kind of imprisonment.”

“There is a great deal of conformity under way, actually,” he added.

& therein lies the real problem. When someone you are trying to talk to ends up getting busy on a phone, the most natural response is not to scold, but to emulate. It’s mutually assured distraction."

"Airplane mode is like picking up red phone to call on a superhero, only nobody is calling you…which is great, because I’m a total misanthrope…

If I go to a bar with somebody and I really want to pay attention to what they are saying – if I want to immerse myself in the conversation, their ideas, etc. – I will flip the phone on airplane mode. If the meeting is fleeting, like I just flew there and we only get one hour a year to catch up: always airplane mode.

I can’t remember the last time I ever used airplane mode on an actual airplane…manufacturers…should change the name of airplane mode to “interesting person mode.”

Then we’ll say goodbye & the interesting person will leave & I’ll probably be drunk & inspired a little more. I’ll turn airplane mode back off & get a series of increasingly pitched text messages from my friends…But nothing that went down couldn’t have waited those two hours, of course; & the attention I paid to them, to you, is what matters."

"Jad gathered up some of Radiolab's greatest sound effects for a sonic gallery put together by The New York Times Magazine. Then, a listener asked us to turn them into ringtones, so we did! Here they are, from the Big Bang, to Wriggling Sperm. Enjoy!"

"Want to know real convenience? Leave a message on my machine, or email me, and I’ll get back to you when I damn well feel like it. And if I desperately need to speak to someone when I’m away from home or office, I’ll either use a payphone (they do still exist, and I can tell you where every one south of 23rd Street is) or borrow someone else’s cell to make the call. Now that’s convenience."

"Punctuality/Attention Span: These two are boons for my friends and loved ones: If we have a date, I’ll almost always be on time, because I can’t call you at the restaurant, after lingering needlessly somewhere, to tell you I’m running late. Also, when we are together, you will have my undivided attention. Really. I will never glance surreptitiously down at the corner of the table to see who is calling/emailing/texting while we’re in the middle of a conversation. Which, by the way, is gross, and if you’re one of the people who does this you don’t deserve the company of other humans."

"The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices is cultural anthropology. It seeks to recover those moments of intuitive prehensile dexterity, when the famous and the ordinary alike felt the unconscious desire to occupy their hands for an as yet unknown purpose. Like Roy Neary's obsession with the image of Devil's Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), this gesture was vague, uncanny and compelling. It is the intimation in images of a gestural second nature to come."

"The telephone, in other words, doesn’t provide any information about status, so we are constantly interrupting one another. The other tools at our disposal are more polite. Instant messaging lets us detect whether our friends are busy without our bugging them, and texting lets us ping one another asynchronously. (Plus, we can spend more time thinking about what we want to say.) For all the hue and cry about becoming an “always on” society, we’re actually moving away from the demand that everyone be available immediately.

In fact, the newfangled media that’s currently supplanting the phone call might be the only thing that helps preserve it. Most people I know coordinate important calls in advance using email, text messaging, or chat (r u busy?). An unscheduled call that rings on my phone fails the conversational Turing test: It’s almost certainly junk, so I ignore it. (Unless it’s you, Mom!)"

"I was thinking about Special Ed concept of Least Restrictive Environment & idea that many of the concepts of special education, such as an IEP, are concepts we should want for every student...

Banning all these devices when there are many kids who can use them wisely & well is not putting kids into the least restrictive environment for their own learning.

Yes, there are some kids who struggle—despite many opportunities to figure how to manage it—to use technology in a classroom without it serving as a distraction. Let's admit that. [some examples & solutions]...Those instances are absolutely the exception, not the rule. (In talking w/ colleagues, I'd say that cell phone misuse is much lower at SLA than it is at schools that theoretically ban their existence.)...

But banning their use or locking up every laptop would hamstring so much of what we do, & it would not be, for the overwhelming majority of students, the least restrictive environment in which they could—& do—learn."